Larrabee engineer on personal blog: Larrabee is all about rasterization

An Intel developer shares optimistic impressions about Larrabee, and …

Tom Forsyth, a developer working for Intel on their upcoming Larrabee GPU, posted a very interesting entry on his personal blog several days ago, in which he clarified some details on the purposes for which Larrabee is being designed. PCPerspective has the scoop. The product will, Forsyth avers, be primarily aimed at "the conventional rasterization pipeline", with its other impressive qualities an added bonus.

What's that, chief?

Larrabee, a massively multicore x86 chip due out in 2010 as a discrete graphics card, has sparked a lot of interest from tech journalists, along with a great deal of confusion. The chip has had a great deal of press as a potential ray-tracing chip, physics cruncher, or HPC chip, but Forsyth emphasized the 2010 release and primary design goals were focused on rasterization because it's the only way to "render the huge range of DirectX and OpenGL games out there."

It makes sense that Larrabee's initial focus would be rasterization, because it will represent Intel's first entry into the gaming graphics market. Intel won't get developers to shift to its ray tracing engine in advance of, or even soon after, Larrabee's launch, so the chip will be focused on dominating the market on its existing terms. Our own Jon Stokes predicted so nearly a year ago.

Forsyth (no, not that one!) was careful to emphasize that Larrabee was capable of ray-tracing and other applications, indeed that it will be "the world's most awesome ray tracer" and also "the world's most awesome chip at a lot of heavy computing applications." Larrabee is, then, a foot in the door for Intel to dominate at raster graphics in existing APIs and then shift the market elsewhere, delivering "exciting changes to the graphics pipeline" in an "incrimental" fashion to suit developer taste.

Forsyth predicts he'll "probably get in trouble" for the post; let's hope this prediction is wrong, and his optimistic appraisal of Larrabee is right.